THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2016
89
NEWYORKER.COM
Kevin Barry on the certainty o young artists.
had missed the call, and she knew at
once why---he had got word of her ad-
venture. She knew on the train home
for midterm break that the great scene
awaited but, still, to hear her father use
the words he did was astonishing.
"What would your dead mother
say if she knew I'd raised up a slut?"
"Where the fuck am I supposed to
go with a question like that?"
"And the tongue on it!"
The quasi-Biblical phrasing that had
lurched in---raised up? In what de-
mented reach of his person had he been
storing this language? The late-October
day was peeled and cool; the light was
miserly by six, the last remnants clawed
in weak scratches across the sky. She
stood with her back to the piano. The
room was dense with gloom. The im-
portant news was that he was gone.
"He was ran out of it," her father said.
"He was ran where?"
"He was ran!"
"Who ran him?"
Her father reddened dangerously
and made to cross the floor but caught
himself and turned his back to her.
He spoke to the wall.
"Did you protect yourself ?"
"Ah, here," she said.
"Did you not think it through?"
"I did not."
"Did you protect yourself ?"
"Nothing happened, Da."
"You were seen!"
"By fucken who! Are they hangin'
out of the fucken trees?"
He turned and again made to cross
the floor to her, but, once more, he
caught himself.
"Where'd he go to, Da?"
"How'd I know that? Jesus Christ,
girl! I mean any young fella at all your
own age and I'd nearly understand it.
The half-wit eejit of the Creminses
even. But this aul' English hoor? You
know he's astray in the head, you do?
You know he's been in and out of the
hospital? Ten months in that place
below and he paid rent twice."
"How was he ran, Da?"
"We were respectable people! At
one time. Around here. You know that,
don't you?"
"Was he hurt, Daddy?"
The lurch of fright in her voice was a
sickening thing and she fled the room in
disgust at it. The fright betrayed a weight
of feeling that was a surprise to her. She
had carried it without knowing. Though
she knew well enough that it was the idea
of him rather than the fact---the idea of
a long, thin, sombre man, in a soak of
noble depression, smelling of lentils, in a
damp pebble-dash bungalow, amid a scrab-
ble of the whitethorn trees, a man ragged
in the province of Connaught and alone
at all seasons, perhaps already betrothed
to a glamorous early death, and under some
especially mischievous arrayment of the
stars he was all that a girl could ask for.
T been no gothic
scene.There would have been no bay-
ing mob.There would have been a rapping
on the door one evening of the autumn,
and quiet words spoken, and their intent
understood at once. He would have packed
his few things in a holdall and the next
morning taken the bus from Ballymote.
He would cross the country and the
sea again. He would settle in a city of the
north and try to find work and fail, and
try to find a hostel and fail, and seek again
the needle's tip and solace. On the nee-
dle's tip he would nod and dream of the
Forestry land rising up to the Ox Moun-
tains and the slight girl with dyed black
hair on the riverbank there one morning.
S fields again as
the October dark fell. She walked
now beneath a cloak of widowly despair.
She had arranged the picture for this
scene, too. She came on his bungalow
in full darkness. It had not been let again,
and the door was unlocked. All had been
packed away and swept neatly. His bed-
room was bare, the kitchen so bare. She
sat on the kitchen floor long into the
night. Outside, late on, something
thrashed through the whitethorn and
the sally trees. She knew it was a deer,
and a young one by the measure of fright
in its movement. But the night folded
again into the quiet of its soft enclosure.
It was moonless and the great dark
pressed in. She reached out for him in
the dark. When she at last rose to
go she was sti from the cold and felt
many years older as she left the house
and made for home through the night
and dark and the pads of her feet beat
out the new soft rhythm of her power.
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